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Christopher Meidel and the First Norwegian Contacts with Quakerism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2011

Henry J. Cadbury
Henry J. Cadbury
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Fifteen years ago when some two million Americans of Norwegian ancestry were celebrating the centennial of the first migration from Norway to America I published in these pages an account of the Quaker antecedents of the famous voyage of the sloop Restaurationen. From English, Norwegian and American sources it was possible to recount the story of a group of Norwegian prisoners of war in prison ships on the Thames who were befriended and converted by English Quakers and returned home in 1814 to Stavanger and elsewhere to establish Quaker meetings. One of these men, Lars Larsen, with men of like independence, such as Cleng Peersen who preceded him and Knud Andersen Slogvig who followed, organized an escape from the clerical oppressions in Norway, purchased a small ship, and landing in New York in October 1825, proceeded inland to found in western New York the first of many Norwegian settlements in the United States. The following scattered data are now collected to indicate some earlier contacts between the English Quakers and Norway.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 1941 , pp. 7 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1941

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References

1 ‘The Norwegian Quakers of 1825,’ Harvard Theological Review, XVIII, 1925, pp. 293–319Google Scholar. Some interesting further evidence of the Quaker connection has been unearthed. See my articles ‘De første norske Kvækere i Amerika,’ Decorah-Posten, (Decorah, Iowa), 1925Google Scholar; ‘De første Kvækere i Stavanger,’ ibid., 1926; ‘Four Immigrant Shiploads of 1836 and 1837,’ Studies and Records, Norwegian-American Historical Association, II, 1927, pp. 20–52. Cf. John Cox, Jr., ‘Norwegian Friends in Western New York,’ Friends' Intelligencer, LXXXII, 1925, pp. 829 f., 848 ff., and Theodore C. Blegen, ‘John Quincy Adams and the Sloop “Restoration,”’ included as an Appendix, pp. 599–628, in his Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition, Northfield, Minn., 1940. See also the second chapter in the same author's Norwegian Migration to America 1825–1860, Northfield, Minn., 1931.

2 A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, 1698, No. 181, p. 140. Fox does not suggest here books in the language of Norway, and in fact Quaker books in Danish must have been very few until the translations by Meidel, to be mentioned later, were published. For the seventeenth century I can mention only one, both small and rare (not named in Joseph Smith's Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books). It is John Higgins, A Message from the Lord, first printed in English in 1658 and translated into Dutch in 1659. The Danish title (taken from James A. Williams, Americana, Catalogue 10, [1937], No. 1431) runs: Saa liuder eet af John Higgins Skrifter udsat af Engelsk. Her udi er forklart Herrens Budskap, etc. Prentet i Amsterdam, Aar 1666.

3 A. R. Barclay, Letters &c. of Early Friends, p. 292.

4 How the Lord by his Power and Spirit did Raise up Friends (MS. at Friends Reference Library, London).

5 Op. cit., London, 1676, pp. 739–743. Presumably this is Porsgrund in Langesund.

6 Reliquiae Baxterianae, Part II, p. 437.

7 W. C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, pp. 46 ff.

8 Amsterdam, 27 April 1666. Both this letter and the account of Degory Marshall are preserved in the Posthuma Christiana of William Crouch, 1712, pp. 87 ff. In a petition to the King at this period Elizabeth Hooton evidently refers to the Black Eagle when she writes: “What reason is there to carry us into other lands and thrust many into an old vissited ship, which was rotten & leaked water, whose blood will be laid to the charge of them that did it, and the rest we know not what is become of them, except they bee took by the Hollanders as some of them are.” Emily Manners, Elizabeth Hooton, 1914, p. 54.

9 Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings, 1753, I, 406, where the names of the twenty-seven who died before the ship reached Land's End are marked with an asterisk.

10 Algemeene kerkelÿke en wereldlÿke Geschiedenissen des Aardkloots, Amsterdam, 1721–1728. Of course Quakerism had been planted in Holland more than ten years before. See William I. Hull, The Rise of Quakerism in Amsterdam, 1938.

11 Portfolio 36–35 at Friends Reference Library, London. The spelling has been modernized.

12 James Bowden, edit., Epistles from the Yearly Meeting of Friends held in London, 1858, I, p. 13.

13 A. T. Gløersen, Slægten Meidell i Norge og Danmark, Kristiania, 1903, pp. 11–15, 128, 166. The latest biographical notice of Meidel, in Brøgger and Jansen, Norsk Biografisk Leksikon, IX, 1939, pp. 125 f., adds no single item of information to what Gløersen had collected. That Meidel became a student at the University of Copenhagen is shown by an entry there for 1677; see Kjøbenhavns Universitets Matrikul, 1611–1740, edited by S. Birket Smith, Vol. II, 1894, p. 75. This is not cited by earlier authorities.

14 Geistlig Edsprotokol for Oslo og Hamar Stifter 1601–1730, Kristiana, 1918, p. 140.

15 First printed in Danish in his translation of William Dell, On Baptism (see below); printed in English in 1839 in the Irish Friend, Belfast, II, p. 36.

16 Harald Faber, Danske og Norske i London og deres Kirker, Copenhagen, 1915, pp. 1, 4–5, 6, 45. Cf. the same author's summary in English in his Caius Gabriel Cibber, 1630–1700, His Life and Work, Oxford, 1926, chap. XI and Johannes Smidt, Fotefar Spor av norsk Kristenliv i London, Bergen, 1927, pp. 18 f.

17 Piety Promoted, Part X, 3rd edit., London, 1821, p. viii.

18 Meidel, op. cit., where he says “ten years”; Faber, op. cit., p. 45. For the text of the original German documents about the separation in the Danish Lutheran congregation see E. F. Wolff, Samlinger til Historien af den danske og norske evangelisk-lutherske Kirke i London, Kjøbenhavn, 1802, pp. 391–398.

19 Morning Meeting Minutes for viii 1700 in Vol. II (1692–1700); for v. 21, 1701, in Vol. III (1700–1711); cf. iv. 19, 1704.

20 Meeting for Sufferings Minutes for ii. 24, 1702, in Vol. XV (1700–1702).

21 Minutes for i. 2. 1701/2.

22 Ibid., for ix. 2, 1702.

23 Ibid., xi. 4, 1702. The same information was recorded by the Meeting for Sufferings on the 15th of the same month (Minutes, Vol. XVI, 1702–1703) in slightly different form: “that a bishop has written to the governour of Norway to arrest and confine Christopher Meidel at his brother's house to prevent his spreading (as they say) the venomous doctrine of Quakerisme — also they pretend that he is imployed to hire persons there to transport themselves to America.” The reference to Quaker instigation of Norwegian emigration to America a century and a quarter before the famous sloop is somewhat prophetic.

24 Ibid., xi. 25, 1702.

25 Meeting for Sufferings Minutes xi. 29; xii. 19, 1702, and ii. 3, 1703.

26 Gløersen, op. cit., pp. 129 f.

27 London Yearly Meeting Minutes, Vol. 3 (1702–1708), iii. 31, 1705. “A Short account of John Salkelds and Christopher Miedells journy into Holld and Part of Germany in ye year 1705.”

28 A Journal of the Life of Thomas Story, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1747, pp. 496 f.

29 Joseph Besse, edit., The Life and Posthumous Works of Richard Claridge, 1726, pp. 185–189. Here is also recorded (pp. 103–116) a Conference between Benjamin Keach a Baptist and the Quakers Claridge and Meidel held at Green's Coffee House, Finch Lane near Cornhill, London, in February 1700/1, and the note (pp. 103 f.): “C. Meidel was by Birth a Norwegian, educated at Copenhagen in Denmark and was first a Preacher to the Danes (Lutherans) in London, then Pastor of an Independent Congregation, meeting in Nightingal-Lane near East-Smithfield, London; and in the year 1699, convinced of and received Truth, as professed by the People called Quakers.”

30 Morning Meeting Minutes, i. 10 and 24, 1706. Thomas Bennet, rector of St. James, Colchester, published A Confutation of Quakerism in 1705. Only after the second edition of 1709 did a Quaker answer appear, The Necessity of Immediate Revelation, by Benjamin Lindley, 1710–1713.

31 Piety Promoted, loc. cit.

32 The Case of Christopher Meidell, loose manuscript in the Record of Cornish Sufferings, Friends Reference Library, London.

33 Minutes of Cornwall Quarterly Meeting (at Swarthmore, Mutley, Plymouth) for viii. 7 and xi. 6, 1707, and iv. 29, viii. 12 and xi. 4, 1708.

34 Piety Promoted, Part X, 3rd edit., London, 1821, p. ix. W. P. is of course William Penn. The Dictionary of National Biography (LI, 284 f.) mentions a letter to Meidel in a collection of Latin letters of William Sewel, but the piece cannot be found.

35 Gløersen, op. cit., p. 131; cf. pp. 141 f.

36 Boken om Bøker, Aarsskrift for Bokvenner, I, 1926, p. 151. The information goes far back, to Carl Deichman (c. 1705–1780).

37 Gløersen, op. cit., p. 130 quoting rescripts of 1704 and 1706.

38 Ministers Visiting Thornbury 1703–1730 (manuscript at Friends Reference Library, London). Meidel is mentioned in the same list as a visitor also in 1706.

39 Letter dated London i. 26, 1700, in S. F. Locker-Lampson, A Quaker Post-Bag, 1910, p. 78.

40 First Publishers of Truth, edited by Norman Penney, 1907, p. 2.

41 For reasons that I can only guess the British Museum Catalogue suggests (with a ?) that Meidel translated this also into French as published in 1701.

42 The MSS. are mentioned by the Meeting for Sufferings, xi. 13, 1709, and by the Yearly Meeting iv. 2, 1710, that of the Apology by the former body as early as ii. 24, 1702. Their minute of xi. 11, 1716 cited in Joseph Smith, Descriptive Catalogue of Friends Books, 1867, I, 184: “500 of C. Meidel's translation of Barclay's Apology into Danish to be printed,” must be a slip of the pen for the Catechism. In Boken and Bøker, loc. cit., the assumption is made that since the Apology in Danish was published in 1738 Meidel must have been living then. But the MS. of it had long been in the hands of Friends in London who no doubt financed and arranged the posthumous publication. The new interest in the Continent felt by English Friends in the 1730's explains the imprints of that time. There were other reprints of the Apology in 1848 and of the Key in 1837, both at Stavanger, also of the former revised in 1881.

43 See G. Richardson, The Rise and Progress of the Society of Friends in Norway, 1849, pp. x, 5, etc.